The Independent Researcher

The most important thing that I think academia has to offer is giving researchers a stable career path to explore long-term questions. I’ve come to appreciate this more after my last phase of work. Working independently was useful to me in earlier stages of research. As public discourse starts to mature, it became more important to have a community... See more

Nadia Eghbal: It’s not just the discovery of knowledge (i.e., learning new things) that’s easier now, but also the validation (where your peers, rather than an accredited institution, decide whether your insights are worth discussing) and distribution of knowledge. Sharing new ideas previously required working with centralized gatekeepers, like a u... See more

If you are able to fund your research independently, and you’re willing to build your own support network, I think independent research is at least worth considering for those who might otherwise have done a PhD. If you’re thinking about this route, here are some of the building blocks that I found important to include.

What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart peo­ple, arrange to do short one-​​off research projects and sim­u­la­tions, pub­lish papers or cap­ture intel­lec­tual prop­erty quickly and eas­ily, and move on to another con­ver­sa­tion. Quickly. Eas­ily. For a liv­ing. Can’t do that in indus­try. Can’t do that in the Acad­emy. Y

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The generative intellectual environments that academic institutions house and foster are being recreated or entirely rethought online, outside of the brick walls of a university. Internet salons, writer collectives, open-source software, fellowships, and cohort-based courses are providing modern alternatives to those institutions. You don’t need an... See more

Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant.

This suggests that a problem may be tackled effectively not my commissioning more research, but by assuming most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals,... See more